From the master himself, Warren Buffett…“Through the tax code, there has been class warfare waged, and my class has won,” Buffett said. “It’s been a rout. You have seen a period where American workers generally have gone no place, and where the really super rich as a group increased their incomes five for one in this rarefied atmosphere.” We may never see it again!

“The return on equity, on tangible equity, for American business today is terrific, overall,” Buffett said in an interview posted today on the website of Berkshire’s Business Wire unit. “Housing is still in the depression of the fall of 2008. It has not come back at all.”

Real estate has defied prior predictions of rebound from Buffett, who said in February 2010 that “within a year or so, residential housing problems should largely be behind us.” The median price of a single-family home decreased in the third quarter from a year earlier in 111 metropolitan areas out of the 150 measured, the National Association of Realtors said in a report this month.

Housing “doesn’t hurt corporate profits that much in most areas,” Buffett said. “But the American worker is not doing well.”

“We had the greatest binge in housing that this country or probably any country has seen,” Buffett said. “When you have a huge bubble in the biggest asset that most people have and that bubble pops, and people have borrowed against that asset and everything, you’re not going to get over it in a day or a year or a month.”